Friday, March 20th, 2026

A photograph of a seaside funfair at night on wet black asphalt. Four rides are running and every one of them is empty: at the upper left a set of swing chairs flies out at full extension with nothing in the seats, motion-blurred against a deep blue sky; below them a waltzer-style ride spins, its cars empty and smeared with movement; on the right a large illuminated wheel turns with every gondola empty; and in the right foreground a carousel revolves with all its horses riderless, lit gold from the inside. Every ride carries thousands of bulbs and its fascia is painted in abstract scrollwork and sunbursts with no lettering anywhere. There is no crowd at all; the wide foreground is bare wet tarmac reflecting the lights. A single operator in a dark jacket leans in the doorway of a small wooden booth with his arms folded, looking at nothing. Alone in the middle of the empty ground, a man in a grey suit a half size too big stands quite still while everything around him moves, seen from behind and turned to look off to one side: a tidy lavender wig, white greasepaint, a rose-pink painted eye ring in profile, a single brown paper bag hanging from one hand at his side. The operator has not looked at him.

Everything moving, nobody on it

S&P 500 6,506.48 · −100.01 · −1.51%

Four times a year, stock-index futures, stock-index options, single-stock options and single-stock futures all expire on the same morning, and the market spends the session unwinding and rebuilding positions that have nothing to do with what anything is worth. On 20 March about 5.2 trillion dollars of contracts came due and 27.5 billion shares changed hands — against a twenty-session average of 20.1 billion, so half again as much trading as a normal day. And under all that motion the market was going one way. The first print of the session, 6,594.66, was the high; the index never traded there again. It ground down through the afternoon, fell off a shelf between two and half past three to a low of 6,473.52, and then jumped nearly thirty-five points in the last twenty minutes on the expiry itself, closing at 6,506.48. Forty-three stocks in the index made new twelve-month highs. Two hundred and seventy-four made new lows.

The photograph Retail at the Closing Fair

The day's protagonist

NextEra Energy NEE

Move: −3.15% to 89.50 on triple its usual volume — the safe thing, sold hardest

On 27 January, the day the index set its record, NextEra rose 1.97 percent and swung six percent between its low and its high, and this archive put it in the ledger with a note to remember it. Here is why. Utilities are the market's bond substitute: regulated returns, unexciting growth, a dividend, and a share price that mostly tracks the cost of money rather than the state of the economy. That is a wonderful thing to own when rates are falling and a terrible one when the central bank has just said inflation will persist longer than it had forecast because of the price of oil. The Federal Reserve had held rates at its most recent meeting and said exactly that. So on the noisiest trading day of the quarter, with 27.5 billion shares changing hands, the sector that fell hardest of the eleven was not technology and was not the banks — it was utilities, down 4.1 percent, with real estate next at 3.2. NextEra traded up to 94.21 in the morning, closed at 89.50 near its low, and did it on 21.9 million shares against the seven to ten million of an ordinary session. The defensive asset was the casualty. That is what it looks like when the thing being repriced is not growth but the discount rate, and it is the least dramatic and most consequential kind of selling there is.

The deeper account

A witching session is the one day a quarter on which the market's plumbing is visible from the street. Contracts written weeks and months earlier all mature at the same bell; the people who wrote them and the people who bought them have to close, roll or take delivery; index funds rebalance against a reconstituted benchmark; and the resulting volume has, in the strict sense, no information in it. Twenty-seven and a half billion shares changed hands and almost none of that was anybody expressing a view. This is why the day's price action is worth reading carefully rather than dismissing: the noise is enormous, but the direction underneath it is unusually clean, because the noise is symmetrical and the direction is not.

The direction was down all day. The opening print was the high and the index spent the following six and a half hours below it, in three steps — a fast forty points in the first twenty minutes, five hours of drift in a twenty-point band, and then a genuine break from about two o'clock that took it to 6,473.52 by half past three. The last twenty minutes recovered thirty-five points, and that recovery is the expiry, not a change of heart: it is what happens when the closing auction has to print an enormous quantity of stock against the settlement prices of contracts. A market that closes 34.80 above its low on quadruple witching has not been rescued.

The two numbers to keep from this session are 43 and 274 — new twelve-month highs against new twelve-month lows inside the index. The S&P 500 was down about five percent from its January record at the time, which sounds survivable, and beneath that arithmetic six times as many of its members were at their worst level in a year as were at their best. Add the Federal Reserve saying that oil would keep inflation elevated longer than it had thought, add Brent printing a record 113 dollars on an Iraqi force majeure, and the specific sector that gets destroyed is the one everybody owns for safety. The photograph is a seaside funfair on its last night of the season with every single ride running and not one person on any of them. All that motion, all those lights, and the ground is bare.

The artifact

LAST NIGHT END OF SEASON RETURN MACHINE RUN CARRIED the wheelyesnone the carouselyesnone the waltzeryesnone the chairsyesnone the carsyesnone the small rideyesnone HOURS RUN all of them TAKINGS nil MANAGER'S NOTE kept the ground lit and every machine turning to the last minute because that is how it is done. power the same as a good saturday. one man in the booth.
The end-of-season return. Every machine run, nothing carried, the hours all of them and the takings nil. Twenty-seven and a half billion shares is the same document in a different hand: the maximum possible quantity of motion, containing no opinion whatsoever.

The ledger — what actually happened

Measure Close Change Marginalia
S&P 500 6,506.48 −100.01 · −1.51% opened 6,594.66 — the high of the day, the first print · low 6,473.52 at 15:30 · up 34.80 in the last twenty minutes on the expiry
The expiry $5.2tn index futures, index options, single-stock options and single-stock futures all expiring at the bell, alongside a quarterly rebalancing of the index itself
Volume 27.5bn shares, against a twenty-session average of 20.1 billion — half again as much trading as a normal day, and none of it an opinion
Highs and lows 43 vs 274 new 52-week highs against new 52-week lows within the S&P 500; on the Nasdaq, 29 against 218. The index was down five percent from January and its members were down a great deal more
NextEra Energy 89.50 −3.15% high 94.21, closed near the low, on 21.9 million shares. Utilities −4.1%, the worst sector; real estate −3.2%; technology −2.1%; financials +0.2%, the only real gainer
IBM 241.77 −3.44% closed exactly on its low of the day, on more than twice its usual volume
Brent crude $113 a record, on a Reuters report that Iraq had declared force majeure on oilfields operated by foreign companies; US crude above 98 dollars
VIX 26.78 +11.3% still not the top. It reads 31.05 a week later
On the week −1.9% the S&P 500; the Dow and the Nasdaq each a little over two percent lower

Sources

  1. Robinhood market-data feed — SPX 10-minute bars and day bar; NEE, IBM, NVDA, SNDK, AMZN, JPM, AVGO and CAT day bars, adjustment none. Pulled 2026-08-28
  2. Zacks via Yahoo Finance — "Stock Market News for Mar 23, 2026" (covers the 20 March session: index closes, sector ETFs, IBM, breadth and new highs/lows, volume, VIX, Brent and the Iraqi force majeure, and the Fed's guidance) — https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/stock-market-news-mar-23-135200663.html